Despite Apple's patents on cell phone touch gestures, HTC was the first to bring a touch-gesture driven phone to the market, with its HTC Touch, released in June 2007. (Source: Overseas Electronics)

Company is standing up to Apple's patent claims

HTC
says in a press
release that it is prepared to fight back against Apple's
patent litigation in court. It has not yet filed an official
response or countersued, but that should follow within a few
weeks.

Apple is currently suing
HTC to block the import of Android handsets into the U.S.
Apple claims that it invented a host of technologies including a
touch-screen finger-swipe unlock gestures, mobile object oriented
graphics, and undervolting a mobile CPU via an interrupt. These
somewhat vague
and far-reaching patents form the basis of Apple's claims.
Apple CEO Jobs released a statement casting his company as the
tireless innovator and his rivals as thieves.

Peter Chou,
chief executive officer, HTC Corporation, says that HTC won't
tolerate Apple's bullying. He states, "HTC disagrees with
Apple's actions and will fully defend itself. HTC strongly advocates
intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other
innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will
continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a
healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience
possible."

The press release points out that HTC achieved
many industry firsts -- the first Windows PDA (1998), the first
Windows Phone (2002), the first gesture-based smart phone (June
2007), and the first Google Android smart phone (October 2008).
Along the way it piled up a fair amount of intellectual property,
which could give it ammo against Apple in court.

Some are
speculating that Google, makers of the Android operating system, may
intervene and aid its handset developers legally to prevent
Apple trying to stomp out the growing Android movement at the
hardware level.

The stakes are high. If Apple wins, it
could effectively take many of the top Android handsets off the U.S.
market, including the HTC Hero, MyTouch, Nexus One, and
the soon-to-be-released
Incredible. If HTC wins, on the other hand, it will likely
damage Apple's image and give the Android movement more
momentum.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

1) visually OS X is NOTHING LIKE Linux desktop from what I remember2) OS X is commercial and has a lot of proprietary closed source stuff, Linux is free and open source - VERY DIFFERENT3) OS X is licensed only for a specific hardware set, Linux is unlimited and runs on any hardware you want - EXTREMELY DIFFERENT

You're nitpicking of a hand full of features that supposedly aren't going to be included in Windows Mobile 7 and I give you a list of about 7 or so pretty huge features in OSX that are similar (if not exact replicas) of Linux design, which makes sense considering where the OSX kernel came from, and all you have to say is:

quote: Ease of use which is the most important difference. Closeness and tight integration with Apple hardware too.

All I have to say to that is: "WOW!"

Even though I started the whole OSX thing with my little attempt at humor earlier and I probably should have seen this coming, I feel this is a little off topic and we should probably gravitate more towards what the article is about. I hope you agree?

The reason Linux isn't mainstream right now has nothing to do with it's advantages over OSX or Windows and everything to do with what it still lacks.

Yes Linux can accomplish nearly every task that Windows and OSX can perform; however, it's still to difficult to setup and maintain for the average user. Windows installs perfectly on my older laptop and everything works instantly with little to no effort at all (installed from a Windows disc and not from a recovery disc). Linux (Debian) requires wireless firmware, the video driver doesn't work perfectly out of the box, software upgrades have been known to be a pain to install, in my virtual machine upgrading xorg and KDE broke my virtual additions sending me back to a console only OS until i extracted and reinstalled the guest additions (something a non-tech user would NEVER be able to do). Upgrading xorg and xserver on my laptop caused my keyboard and touch pad to stop working at which point i had to reconfigure my xorg config file with a back up I'd made that I'd never have been able to make if i didn't understand chmod and the command prompt. Not even to mention the absolute MESS of distros out there which is a complete nightmare for the average user to understand.

Any sane, good tech person will tell you that Windows is great for beginners because it's fast, stable, and easy to learn, and excellent for techs because it provides adaptability and a decent level of customization and all the tools you need to tweak and tinker while still remaining fairly easy to use/learn...

For the same reason the WII is winning, Windows appeals to the most demographics, and because of this... for now it is firmly the most used and (in my opinion) best desktop operating system to date.